


Counterbalance

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Skies
Genre: Ficlet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 18:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20018692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: "You asked about my enemies, I know," he says. "But when you get to my age, it's the same thing."





	Counterbalance

The Defiant Devil meets the Scarlet Condottiere outdoors, alone, in a pagoda shielded by walls of climbing bramble. The air is sweet but cold, and beyond the thorns, above the clouds, silver starlight cuts through the dark in silent reminder of why he’s here. The Condottiere rises with familiar formality to greet him, pours wine for the two of them and lifts his glass in toast.

“To truce,” he says, as their glasses clink, “and to the enemy of my enemies.”

The Defiant Devil takes a small sip, considering. An acceptable vintage, he decides. Better than he has a right to expect, given their last encounter during the Revolution, but the Condottiere has always been courteous. Deceptively so. For all the pride he takes in that useless old aristocratic order, he is formidable, as ally and enemy both. Pointless to ask which of the two he is now; these things shift and change, down the centuries. Two thousand years hence, and he will be something different still.

“I had hoped,” the Devil says drily, “that what we were was more complicated than that.”

“You value complication too highly,” the Condottiere says. “What we are is as simple as this: if we meet again in the skies, do not doubt that I’ll kill you. Or we will kill a sun together.”

“But we’re not in the skies,” the Defiant Devil says. “You’re far too polite to slay a guest, no matter how much you might wish to, and there are no suns in attendance. Which means that you invited me with something else in mind.”

He sets the glass aside and leans forward, smiling lazily. Beneath the gold of the Condottiere’s eyes, something ancient wakes and stirs. And then he moves – grasps the Defiant Devil’s wrist with fingers that curl like the claws he keeps hidden, bows his head as he might to one of his Saints. The Devil feels the brush of his breath, hot as the memory of their home-in-exile, the scrape of fangs and the roughness of scarred lips against his skin. The Condottiere’s hand, too, is scored with criss-crossing lines, and beneath his armor there are more and deeper scars, the damage of millennia worn like a trophy. The Devil had given him a few of them himself, and earned a few of his own, not all in battle. 

Eternity is not kind to sharp lines and clear definitions; he remembers the midair clash and fall, the talons digging beneath the flame and brass of his armor to pierce his flesh, but how much of that is violence, and how much a keener sort of pleasure, it’s harder to recall. 

The Condottiere releases him, leaving only a rapidly-fading memory of heat and pressure that calls him back unbidden to every time they’ve met before. His erstwhile enemy sits back, formal again, but the Defiant Devil isn’t fooled; there had been a hunger in that kiss, and a message alongside it, somewhere between a reminder and a promise. The Devil means to take him up on it, and whatever else he might offer, and to return it in equal measure. After all, no matter the ambiguity, one constant remains: there are few who know quite so well as the two of them how to cut to the heart.


End file.
